Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Reinhard Pötz wrote: Ralph Goers wrote: First, let me say that I don't think the Spring policy is going to end up being as bad as it was made out to be at first glance, although that may just be wishful thinking. I have the same hopes but something tells me that it is only another step into the direction of closed source :-( I'm glad to see that wishful thinking can be helpful: http://blog.springsource.com/2008/10/07/a-question-of-balance-tuning-the-maintenance-policy/ For those who don't want to read Rod's (rather long) blog entry, here is the most relevant part of it: We are amending our maintenance policy in the light of community feedback. We will make regular binary releases from the Spring trunk available to the community, with no 3 month window. For each version of Spring, community releases will be available while it remains the trunk or until the next version is stable. In particular this means that Spring will roll 2.5.x releases until the first release candidate of Spring 3.0 is available. I think this is well balanced and will help all parties: On the one hand SpringSource gets paid for maintaining old stuff like 1.2.x/2.0.x and soon 2.5.x. This also means that if you use Spring or recommend Spring to your customers you can be sure that there will be maintenance releases available for 3 years. Compare this to e.g. Guice which was released in April 2007 the last time. On the other hand, those who want to use Spring for free, just have to upgrade regularly to the latest version. This gives you all the latest features of Spring and SpringSource gets early feedback. -- Reinhard Pötz Managing Director, {Indoqa} GmbH http://www.indoqa.com/en/people/reinhard.poetz/ Member of the Apache Software Foundation Apache Cocoon Committer, PMC member [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Hi, On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 9:09 PM, Antonio Gallardo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...I would like to know how you guys think this affects cocoon: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50727 Note the corresponding FAQ at http://www.springsource.com/products/enterprise/maintenancepolicy/faq I think the only impact is that if Cocoon uses older releases of Spring, and needs patches for them, we'll have to create and/or use snapshots. Assuming the Spring codebase is trustable via its test suite, that's IMHO only an organizational problem. -Bertrand
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 22:17 -0700, Ralph Goers wrote: Thorsten Scherler wrote: On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 09:10 -0600, Antonio Gallardo wrote: Hi, There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? How people feel to create a spring fork here on the ASF and we can make sure that we will not have this problem in the future? You do realize that some ASF board members are employed by SpringSource, right? Meaning? I did not know but to be honest that should not influence whether the ASF would fork spring and secure that it keeps open. However let us see whether their keep this policy and how that influence us. salu2 -- Thorsten Scherler thorsten.at.apache.org Open Source Java consulting, training and solutions
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Ralph Goers wrote: Thorsten Scherler wrote: On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 09:10 -0600, Antonio Gallardo wrote: Hi, There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? How people feel to create a spring fork here on the ASF and we can make sure that we will not have this problem in the future? You do realize that some ASF board members are employed by SpringSource, right? Should this have any influence on our decisions? -- Reinhard Pötz Managing Director, {Indoqa} GmbH http://www.indoqa.com/en/people/reinhard.poetz/ Member of the Apache Software Foundation Apache Cocoon Committer, PMC member [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Leszek Gawron wrote: Sylvain Wallez wrote: Joerg Heinicke wrote: On 24.09.2008 00:00, Sylvain Wallez wrote: Yeah. I read this as 3 months after release n+1 is out, release n becomes closed source. I'm wondering how long it will take for forks to appear that will provide open source bug fixes to old releases. I don't think that's n+1 but n: After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. They wouldn't talk about initial stability issues anymore if it were n+1. Wow, that's even worse... That move is probably plain stupid. Rod Johnson states that the full source tree will still be available - there will be simply no public releases after 3 months and no svn tags to build that release yourself. You will only be able to build snapshots (better said internal releases) to address the issues you encounter. Yet again: plain stupid. Every open source project will have to track it's spring version by its own. How will the project be able to report issues if 99% of the world will be using snapshots? My spring version r144554 shows some problem? Clearly this is very short sighted. There's an easy way the OSS community can react to that: create an OpenSpring.org website that will provide official open source maintenance releases from well-known revisions of the SpringSource SCM. That way, people will be able to use e.g. openspring 2.4.8 which will actually be springsource r144554 It is even more insulting to the comunity stating that it is too costly for SpringSource to do 'mvn deploy' from time to time. It's just a marketing version of Buy a damn subscription!. There's an quick and easy way to force users to subscription: just make major releases less frequent. If you haven't read on TSS: Although the prices are not publicly known someone stated that yearly subscription is something about $16 000... Ouch. Spring was born as a lightweight and open source alternative to big and costly J2EE containers. It's now as big and costly (and as bloated?) as a J2EE container... Sylvain -- Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
First, let me say that I don't think the Spring policy is going to end up being as bad as it was made out to be at first glance, although that may just be wishful thinking. In any case, I think it is extremely premature to talk about forking the code. I think if you were to put yourself in the position where you were a happy employee of SpringSource looking to insure that your company stays healthy into the future, you would find it difficult to support the code being forked into the ASF. I certainly know I would. Although you'd probably like to think that what you do at the ASF is completely independent of your employer it is never really quite that simple. Reinhard Pötz wrote: Ralph Goers wrote: Thorsten Scherler wrote: On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 09:10 -0600, Antonio Gallardo wrote: Hi, There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? How people feel to create a spring fork here on the ASF and we can make sure that we will not have this problem in the future? You do realize that some ASF board members are employed by SpringSource, right? Should this have any influence on our decisions?
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Ralph Goers wrote: First, let me say that I don't think the Spring policy is going to end up being as bad as it was made out to be at first glance, although that may just be wishful thinking. I have the same hopes but something tells me that it is only another step into the direction of closed source :-( In any case, I think it is extremely premature to talk about forking the code. yes it is, but I fear that we will see several forks because not everybody will be eager to build Spring himself and put them into internal repositories. I think if you were to put yourself in the position where you were a happy employee of SpringSource looking to insure that your company stays healthy into the future, you would find it difficult to support the code being forked into the ASF. I certainly know I would. Although you'd probably like to think that what you do at the ASF is completely independent of your employer it is never really quite that simple. Sure, it wouldn't be easy for them but I guess that they would simply abstain from all related decisions. (Except from lobbying against an ASF fork of Spring they can't do anything else anyway because voting against it wouldn't prevent anything AFAIU) -- Reinhard Pötz Managing Director, {Indoqa} GmbH http://www.indoqa.com/en/people/reinhard.poetz/ Member of the Apache Software Foundation Apache Cocoon Committer, PMC member [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Rainer Pruy wrote: A clear statement along only the most current release will receive maintenance efforts would have been much easier and clearer (and would get broader acceptance by the community). That the whole thing was not put that way contributes to the impression that users should be convinced into a support contract. Thanks Rainer, that's more or less the same that I wanted to say. Maybe SpringSource can be convinced to change their policy into this direction. WDOT, would a petition help for that purpose? -- Reinhard Pötz Managing Director, {Indoqa} GmbH http://www.indoqa.com/en/people/reinhard.poetz/ Member of the Apache Software Foundation Apache Cocoon Committer, PMC member [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
I'd doubt a petition by itself would make them change the policy. Probably they no longer can afford time, money or other resource to support community version of spring. If they are trying to make a business out of it it is quite obvious that they won't pop up asking for someone to take over. Nevertheless, It might help indicating to them that their behaviour might endanger any business perspective implied so that they are more willing to keep a sufficient level of support. I personally do think there is no need for immediate action. But in the worst case we will be in a similar situation as when the current team around spring had declared their retirement from spring project: A new team needs to take over. So let's have a close watch at further development of the issue Rainer Reinhard Pötz schrieb: Rainer Pruy wrote: A clear statement along only the most current release will receive maintenance efforts would have been much easier and clearer (and would get broader acceptance by the community). That the whole thing was not put that way contributes to the impression that users should be convinced into a support contract. Thanks Rainer, that's more or less the same that I wanted to say. Maybe SpringSource can be convinced to change their policy into this direction. WDOT, would a petition help for that purpose? -- Rainer Pruy Geschäftsführer Acrys Consult GmbH Co. KG Untermainkai 29-30, D-60329 Frankfurt Tel: +49-69-244506-0 - Fax: +49-69-244506-50 Web: http://www.acrys.com - Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Handelsregister: Frankfurt am Main, HRA 31151
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
On 24.09.2008 00:00, Sylvain Wallez wrote: Yeah. I read this as 3 months after release n+1 is out, release n becomes closed source. I'm wondering how long it will take for forks to appear that will provide open source bug fixes to old releases. I don't think that's n+1 but n: After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. They wouldn't talk about initial stability issues anymore if it were n+1. Joerg
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Hi, yes, all the wording is quite confusing. The statement cited by Peter is trying to convince readers into believing it will affect only old releases, but there nowhere is a guarantee put up that there will be a new release within the 3month period. And the policy puts up that 3 month period per release without referring to later releases. A clear statement along only the most current release will receive maintenance efforts would have been much easier and clearer (and would get broader acceptance by the community). That the whole thing was not put that way contributes to the impression that users should be convinced into a support contract. Rainer Joerg Heinicke schrieb: On 24.09.2008 00:00, Sylvain Wallez wrote: Yeah. I read this as 3 months after release n+1 is out, release n becomes closed source. I'm wondering how long it will take for forks to appear that will provide open source bug fixes to old releases. I don't think that's n+1 but n: After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. They wouldn't talk about initial stability issues anymore if it were n+1. Joerg
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Joerg Heinicke wrote: On 24.09.2008 00:00, Sylvain Wallez wrote: Yeah. I read this as 3 months after release n+1 is out, release n becomes closed source. I'm wondering how long it will take for forks to appear that will provide open source bug fixes to old releases. I don't think that's n+1 but n: After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. They wouldn't talk about initial stability issues anymore if it were n+1. Wow, that's even worse... Sylvain -- Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Sylvain Wallez wrote: Joerg Heinicke wrote: On 24.09.2008 00:00, Sylvain Wallez wrote: Yeah. I read this as 3 months after release n+1 is out, release n becomes closed source. I'm wondering how long it will take for forks to appear that will provide open source bug fixes to old releases. I don't think that's n+1 but n: After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. They wouldn't talk about initial stability issues anymore if it were n+1. Wow, that's even worse... That move is probably plain stupid. Rod Johnson states that the full source tree will still be available - there will be simply no public releases after 3 months and no svn tags to build that release yourself. You will only be able to build snapshots (better said internal releases) to address the issues you encounter. Yet again: plain stupid. Every open source project will have to track it's spring version by its own. How will the project be able to report issues if 99% of the world will be using snapshots? My spring version r144554 shows some problem? Clearly this is very short sighted. It is even more insulting to the comunity stating that it is too costly for SpringSource to do 'mvn deploy' from time to time. It's just a marketing version of Buy a damn subscription!. There's an quick and easy way to force users to subscription: just make major releases less frequent. If you haven't read on TSS: Although the prices are not publicly known someone stated that yearly subscription is something about $16 000... lg -- Leszek Gawron http://www.mobilebox.pl/krs.html CTO at MobileBox Ltd.
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Hi, There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? I think changing the rules is not fair at all. That should rings our bells. Most important, our own user base will suffer. Any of our user now have to have in the pocket 16k yearly in order to deploy a cocoon 2.2 based application. That does not sounds good at all. There are many ways to describe the spirit of the apache community, but there is one that I like more than all the others: 'we care about people more than we care about code'. We have to do something. Best Regards, Antonio Gallardo. Antonio Gallardo escribió: Hi folks, Perhaps an old news for some, but I would like to know how you guys think this affects cocoon: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50727 Are we going to take some actions on that? Best Regards, Antonio Gallardo.
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:10 AM, Antonio Gallardo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? I think changing the rules is not fair at all. That should rings our bells. Most important, our own user base will suffer. Any of our user now have to have in the pocket 16k yearly in order to deploy a cocoon 2.2 based application. That does not sounds good at all. There are many ways to describe the spirit of the apache community, but there is one that I like more than all the others: 'we care about people more than we care about code'. We have to do something. I'm not convinced that anything needs to be done at the moment. I don't like what they've done but I also don't think they are stupid, they are not going to piss off their entire user base. I'd suggest we simply continue to watch what happens for the next three months (at least) before we conclude that any action is necessary. If at that point we see real problems it won't be too late, we should still have a stable base that can continue to work for another 6 months or so. At this point maybe the best thing to do is scope out possible directions to head if this does indeed turn out to be an issue? -- Peter Hunsberger
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 09:10 -0600, Antonio Gallardo wrote: Hi, There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? How people feel to create a spring fork here on the ASF and we can make sure that we will not have this problem in the future? salu2 I think changing the rules is not fair at all. That should rings our bells. Most important, our own user base will suffer. Any of our user now have to have in the pocket 16k yearly in order to deploy a cocoon 2.2 based application. That does not sounds good at all. There are many ways to describe the spirit of the apache community, but there is one that I like more than all the others: 'we care about people more than we care about code'. We have to do something. Best Regards, Antonio Gallardo. Antonio Gallardo escribió: Hi folks, Perhaps an old news for some, but I would like to know how you guys think this affects cocoon: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50727 Are we going to take some actions on that? Best Regards, Antonio Gallardo. -- Thorsten Scherler thorsten.at.apache.org Open Source Java consulting, training and solutions
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
On 24.09.2008 17:10, Antonio Gallardo wrote: There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? Spring is released with Apache 2 license so we are free to grab and host a fork if it will be necessary. I think changing the rules is not fair at all. That should rings our bells. Most important, our own user base will suffer. Any of our user now have to have in the pocket 16k yearly in order to deploy a cocoon 2.2 based application. That does not sounds good at all. Of course it's a Bad Thing, but they are free to do so and we have to live with it. As it looks now it's gonna be alright. There are many ways to describe the spirit of the apache community, but there is one that I like more than all the others: 'we care about people more than we care about code'. We have to do something. No idea how the one relates to the other :) But I oppose immediate actions. I wrote I really wonder if they are gonna keep up the policy in the state it is right now. And even if there is no reason for immediate actions since it still works. We just have to go from one major release to the next one (which is actually minor) without a lots of intermediate patch releases. Joerg
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Thorsten Scherler wrote: On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 09:10 -0600, Antonio Gallardo wrote: Hi, There is a worst case scenario now: What if they don't collect enough money from subscriptions and do the next step: remove the 3 months window or worse go full closed source? How people feel to create a spring fork here on the ASF and we can make sure that we will not have this problem in the future? You do realize that some ASF board members are employed by SpringSource, right? Ralph
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Joerg Heinicke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 22.09.2008 21:09, Antonio Gallardo wrote: Perhaps an old news for some, but I would like to know how you guys think this affects cocoon: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50727 Are we going to take some actions on that? IMO it's a shame, I'm really disappointed. Not even JBoss did something similar to that. I wonder if they can keep this up. The source is supposed to be available though meaning we aren't forced to take any actions. Also it might be enough to just use the available releases. If somebody has more recent releases due to enterprise service support he will be free to use those. Joerg Don't think the impact is anything major: --- What the maintenance policy will mean to you: For the open source community: If you are happy to track the latest major release of Spring (e.g. 3.0, 3.1 or 4.0), all fixes go into the next major release. You get all the latest features and up-to-date fixes--what you would expect from any healthy open source project. For enterprise production users: If you are an enterprise customer that cannot or will not regularly upgrade to the latest release--that is, your use of open source differs from normal open source culture of following the latest release--you can subscribe to our SpringSource Enterprise products. By doing this you help to ensure that innovation continues to be available to the community. Given that such customers have little tolerance for risk, running open source in the core of their applications without support makes no sense anyway. As the number of versions of Spring used in production grows, it is impossible for us to provide free maintenance for multiple releases and perform backports of issues. Doing so would unfairly subsidize conservative customers who want to remain on a previous version, at the cost of the open source community. SpringSource contributes a huge and growing amount of open source to the community. Check out the around one hundred releases this year across the many open source projects we are involved in. Providing a clear maintenance policy will ensure that we can continue to do so. Rod Johnson, Spring Founder CEO, SpringSource -- -- Peter Hunsberger
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
On 23.09.2008 22:43, Peter Hunsberger wrote: As the number of versions of Spring used in production grows, it is impossible for us to provide free maintenance for multiple releases and perform backports of issues. Doing so would unfairly subsidize conservative customers who want to remain on a previous version, at the cost of the open source community. The reasoning is totally awkward. Nobody questions discontinuing support for old major releases. But how does the above justify not providing patch releases after 3 month of a major release? [1] They are doing those releases anyway. The last sentence above is purely a joke. At the end the new maintenance policy is a means to push people into the enterprise support program. They are absolutely free to do so, but they should admit it not talk crap. Joerg [1] http://www.springsource.com/products/enterprise/maintenancepolicy
Re: New Spring Maintenance policy
Joerg Heinicke wrote: On 23.09.2008 22:43, Peter Hunsberger wrote: As the number of versions of Spring used in production grows, it is impossible for us to provide free maintenance for multiple releases and perform backports of issues. Doing so would unfairly subsidize conservative customers who want to remain on a previous version, at the cost of the open source community. The reasoning is totally awkward. Nobody questions discontinuing support for old major releases. But how does the above justify not providing patch releases after 3 month of a major release? [1] They are doing those releases anyway. The last sentence above is purely a joke. At the end the new maintenance policy is a means to push people into the enterprise support program. They are absolutely free to do so, but they should admit it not talk crap. Yeah. I read this as 3 months after release n+1 is out, release n becomes closed source. I'm wondering how long it will take for forks to appear that will provide open source bug fixes to old releases. Sylvain -- Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
New Spring Maintenance policy
Hi folks, Perhaps an old news for some, but I would like to know how you guys think this affects cocoon: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50727 Are we going to take some actions on that? Best Regards, Antonio Gallardo.